This strategy seems to be the most logical, but often the least utilized to its fullest potential. Everything in marketing starts and ends with the customer. The more you know about them, the better you can anticipate their needs, understand their problems, and reduce friction in their life. If you focus 100% on them, you'll win all day long.

When focusing on your customer, there are five big things you need to dig deep into before creating ads or placing media.

1. Customer problem
2. Customer demographics
3. Customer actions
4. Customer voice
5. Customer attention

Let's start with the customer problem.

Take a good, hard look at the service and/or product you offer. Don't think of it from a "feature" standpoint, but think of it as what problem you are solving for your customers. Don't sell a hamburger. Sell a way to satisfy hunger. Don't sell life insurance. Show how a family will be protected when they lose a head of household. Don't sell me a discounted drink. Show me a social event that might change my life.

To know your audience is to know the problem you solve for them. Think about the audience first and how you can help them. Good marketing is simply creating a conversation about a problem that you have the solution to. If you have several problems you solve, even better, but keep it simple. Create multiple campaigns and only solve one problem at a time. Make sure you define the audience for each problem moving forward.

Who has this problem? First, dig into the demographics.

The "easy way" that most marketers push is creating an audience based on age, gender, household income, and basic parameters, all of which are important. In today's world, there is so much technology and information on consumers that there is no reason you can't get more granular with your demos to discover the best audience for your product or service. Even if you're not 100% sure at first what demo is best, use segmentation to help you optimize. Leverage data resources to help you find audiences that best fit your customer's profile. Try to discover commonalities in hobbies, positions, or lifestyles. You have to start somewhere, and if you're consistently marketing to "age 25+," then you'll never know which segmentation actually performs the best.

Pro marketing tip: When segmenting your audience, be sure the creative matches the audience.

For example, don't use the same images and messages for 25-year-olds that you would for 50-year-olds. Look back to the problem/solution analysis and match the audience with the problem.

Know your customer's "actions."

Let's face it: your phone has become your lifeline. This hand-held device made life a lot easier for every consumer on the planet. But their convenience has also created an open-source of opt-in data for marketers.

What this technology tracks is their online and offline activity. Understanding the websites they visit and stores or events they visit will help you isolate the exact consumers who will be interested in your product. For example, if you're a restaurant looking to generate more customers on a Friday night, you could geotarget local high school football games and send targeted messages that say, bring your ticket from the game and get a free appetizer. Or you could geotarget all of the restaurants and pull data from people searching "restaurants near me" and send them specials about your Friday events.

If you're not optimizing this information for your marketing, your competitors are getting ahead. These tools are a great way to eliminate sending offers to people who will not be interested and maximize your impressions to the customers most likely to convert. This deep dive into someone's activity creates a better marketing environment for them and a more efficient strategy for you. Remember, you're solving a problem for them: where to continue the party and eat on Friday night.

Know your customer's voice.

A customer's voice isn't what they sound like when they talk, but more about the language they use. For example, if your primary audience calls for males in their 40s, married, with kids, and with an income of over $150K. That's a pretty detailed demographic. But what if you knew half of them drove a Prius, and the other drove a full-size truck? The way you position your ads would be completely different. The same way you might start a conversation with them differently if you were to meet them at a networking event. It's what we do in real life, so it's what you need to do in marketing to create the most engagement. The more you know about the customer, the more you can start those conversations.

In modern marketing, there is nothing more important than human connection and empathy.

Lastly, know where your customer's attention is.

Seems pretty obvious, but if you've gone this far to do the research, you should have a good idea of where your preferred customer's attention is. You can often programmatically chase these customers based on their online and offline activity. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket. People are exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads daily, so you can mix it up and create engagement in as many different channels as they are in.

Continuously monitor and optimize for best results.

The best strategies are the ones that are flexible. If you put a lot of time into getting the information and profile correct, be sure to be patient with the outcome, but also be sure to monitor it closely. Look for ways to optimize opportunities, but don't be too quick to eliminate "failures." The team that wins is the team that understands what is happening and makes timely adjustments that benefit the company's long-term growth.

"If you're truly focused on providing value to your customers, the competition becomes irrelevant." - Gary Vaynerchuk

If you're interested in learning more about The Moran Group and how we partner with clients to help them meet their marketing goals, feel free to reach out to me directly. I'd be happy to provide you with a free "prescriptive recommendation" once I find out more about your problems and goals. Schedule a 30-minute call here, or simply email me at mpaine@themorangroup.net if you're interested.

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